to die.  The people might not be ready to overthrow Louis Philippe, to give his place to Louis Napoleon, but it did not follow that they would have seen the latter’s execution with satisfaction, because they desired peace, and he had fallen into the habit of breaking it.  The enthusiasm that was created in France by the arrival in that country of the remains of Napoleon I., not three months after the coming Napoleon III. had been sent to the fortress of Ham, showed how difficult a matter it would have been to proceed capitally against the Prince.  Louis Philippe has been praised for sparing him; but the praise is undeserved.  Certainly, the King of the French was not a cruel man, and it was with sincere regret that he signed the death-warrants of men who had sought his own life, and who had murdered his friends; but it would have been no act of cruelty, had he sent his rival to the guillotine.  When a man makes a throw for a crown, he accepts what is staked, against it,—­a coffin.  Nothing is better established than this, that, when a sovereign is assailed, the intention of the assailant being his overthrow, that sovereign has a perfect right to put his rival to death, if he succeed in obtaining possession of his person.  The most confirmed believer in Richard III.’s demoniac character would not think of adding the execution of Richmond to his crimes, had Plantagenet, and not Tudor, triumphed on Bosworth Field.  James II. has never been blamed for causing Monmouth to be put to death, but for having complied with his nephew’s request for a personal interview, at which he refused to grant his further request for a mitigation of punishment.  Murat’s death was an unnecessary act, but Ferdinand of Naples has never been censured for it.  Had Louis Philippe followed these examples, and those of a hundred similar cases, he could not have been charged with undue severity in the exercise of his power for the conservation of his own rights, and the maintenance of the tranquillity, not of France alone, but of Europe, and of the world, which the triumph of a Bonaparte might have perilled.  He spared the future Emperor’s life, not from any considerations of a chivalric character, but because he durst not take it.  He feared that the blood of the offender would more than atone for his offence, and he would not throw into the political caldron so rich a material, dreading the effects of its presence there.  Then the Orleans party and the Imperial party not only marched with each other, but often crossed and ran into each other; and it was not safe to run the risk of offending the first by an attempt to punish its occasional ally.  There was, too, something of the ludicrous in the Boulogne affair, which enabled government to regard the chief offender with cheap compassion.  Louis Philippe is entitled to no credit, on the score of mercy, for his conduct in 1840,—­for the decision of the Court of Peers was his inspiration; but he acted wisely,—­so wisely, that, if he had done as well in 1848, his grandson would at this moment have been King of the French, and the Emperor that is a wanderer, with nothing but a character for flightiness and a capacity for failure to distinguish him from the herd, while many would have regarded him as a madman.  But the end was not then, and the hand of Fate was not even near that curtain which was to be raised for the disclosure of events destined to shake and to change the world.